2019 Review – Blogs, Pluralsight, Speaking, Podcasts, Books, Promotion and more

2019 is at its end closing out the current decade beginning a new decade! The 2010s have been great with a lot of personal and professional growth. I am looking forward to and welcome what the 2020s will bring! Overall 2019 was a great year with lots of fantastic adventures and accomplishments. In this blog post, I am going to reflect on 2019. I am also going to try something new in this blog post. I will recount some failures from this year along with the successes. I typically don’t post about failures or even speak about them publicly but I think it is important to reflect on them as a learning opportunity and share with others as we all win some and lose some.

Ok. Let me briefly recount the losses from 2019. No so good events from 2019 are:

I failed a couple of certifications including the AZ-302 upgrade exam (should have studied more) and the Terraform beta exam. I reviewed an Azure book that did not publish. This one was out of my control but still something this year that I am not proud of but definitely learned to ask more questions about a project like this before saying yes.
In 2019 I was not accepted to speak at Ignite. It’s actually been several years since I have been accepted to speak at Ignite. That is the list. Again we win some things in life and we lose some. The important thing is to learn from any losses, roll with the punches and keep moving forward.

Now for the fun part of this post. Let’s move onto the wins! First off the #1 win of 2019 is that my family was healthy and happy for another year! Also, I was able to continue to focus on Azure and DevOps adding in Containers, Kubernetes and more open source in general. Here is a full recount of what occurred in 2019.

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Azure Stack book (coming soon) & training

It has been a long time coming but I recently have wrapped up a couple projects around Azure Stack. The first is a course on Azure Stack for Opsgility the second is a book on Azure Stack in the Unleashed Series.

For the first project I was fortunate enough to help build some Azure Stack training for the folks at Opsgility. It was great working with Azure MVP’s Michael Washam (@mwashamtx)  and  Dan Patrick (@deltadan) on this.

Here is an overview of the course:

This course is designed for cloud architects, cloud administrators, DevOps engineers, and IT professionals that have experience with Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services (IaaS) and Platform Services (PaaS). This course focuses on architecting, deploying, and managing Microsoft’s enterprise hybrid cloud solution Azure Stack. This course covers scenarios such as Azure Stack Architecture, deploying and configuring Azure Stack to be enterprise ready, configuring Azure Stack for tenants, region management, monitoring, backup and disaster recovery.

Here are a couple of screenshots from the online training:


Be sure to check out the course here:

https://www.opsgility.com/courses/player/implementing-azure-stack


The second project is a book on Azure Stack in the Pearson Unleashed Series. It is not published yet but all the chapters are in and the book will be published in the near future! This book has a solid team of authors who are all Microsoft MVP’s. I was honored to work with them. The authors are: Kerrie Meyler (@kerriemeyler), Jakob Svendsen (@JakobGSvendsen), Mark Scholman (@markscholman), and Janaka Rangama (@JanakaRangama). Here is a picture of the Azure Stack book author team:

Also thanks to Marc van Eijk (@_marcvaneijk) of the Azure CAT team for doing the technical review and Daniel Savage (@dsavageatms) PM on the Azure Stack team for writting the foreword.

Here is the cover for the book:

Here is the book description:  “Microsoft Hybrid Cloud with Azure Stack and Azure Unleashed cuts through the hype to explain exactly what hybrid cloud is, presents complete CloudOps- & DevOps-based implementation strategies, guides you through deploying the brand-new Microsoft Azure Stack, and helps you maximize the value of your hybrid cloud investment.

Written by an expert team of Microsoft Cloud and Datacenter MVPs, it covers all-new material included in no othe book, and thoroughly illuminates Microsoft Azure Stack, one of Microsoft’s most eagerly awaited cloud technologies.

This book is built on real-world scenarios and the authors’ extraordinary early adopter, hands-on experience. Leading System Center expert Kerrie Meyler and her colleagues guide you through every step and technique you’ll need to build your own secure, high-performance hybrid cloud infrastructure.

You’ll discover how Azure Stack enables you to run your datacenters with the same scalability, redundancy, and reliability for computer, network, and storage as Microsoft’s own Azure datacenters; how to integrate Azure infrastructure and platform services for use in your internal operations; how to manage virtualized instances of Microsoft software; and how to manage key dependencies with other products and technologies that Microsoft’s hybrid cloud solution depends upon.”

Here is the link to the books page on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Hybrid-Unleashed-Kerrie-Meyler/dp/0672338505  This is the link you want to watch for the publish date.

Happy Azure Stacking!

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